Locations

Nitrado operates with fully-owned hardware in seven tier-3 data centers across the globe, ensuring low latencies world-wide.

The locations and the partners we’re working with are hand-picked and must fulfill an extensive list of requirements regarding quality, reliability, security and response time. Instead of simply outsourcing all tasks to external companies, Nitrado staff is regularly on-site at our data centers to install new hardware, perform maintenance work and to ensure that our quality requirements are met.

Our locations also have direct “peerings” with several large Internet Service Providers. That means that your game traffic will take the shortest internet route to you, ensuring the lowest ping possible.

Hardware

Nitrado fully owns its hardware. While many other server providers simply rent the hardware their servers run on, we have full flexibility regarding the hardware components we use and the software that runs on them.

We only use server-grade hardware, optimized specifically for running game servers.

CPU

Nitrado currently only installs latest-generation Intel Xeon processors. Because we’re an Intel Partner, we often have access to the newest CPU models before they even hit the market, always bringing us one step ahead.

We run up to 44 cores in a single server, which allows us to simply shrug off common fluctuations in resource usage.

For big game servers with many player slots, however, high clock frequency is more important than having many cores. This is why we have a wide variety of different CPU models in our arsenal, and our system will automatically assign your game server to a hardware configuration that ensures a great gaming experience.

SSD Storage

All of our game servers exclusively use enterprise-grade SSD storage. This heavily benefits games with large worlds, as this data is constantly written to and read from the storage. This way we ensure minimum loading times while playing and also during server updates and restarts.

ECC RAM

Our servers all use Error-Correcting Code (ECC) RAM.

ECC RAM automatically detects and corrects errors that occur in memory. Those errors don’t occur too often, but when they do, they could potentially lead to data corruption and even crashes if only standard RAM was used.

This is why we go for that extra bit of stability and exclusively use ECC RAM in our servers.

Reliability

Even the best hardware can break. Because of that, all of our important components are redundant, and on top of that we regularly create backups of all game server systems.

DDoS Protection

Having a DDoS protection is nothing special. What counts is to offer one that actually works.

Our in-house networking expertise allows us to employ a three-layered approach to DDoS protection, combining different techniques to achieve the maximum effect.

• Firstly, our partnerships with Internet Service Providers and our broad network ensure that our connections aren’t “clogged up” by high incoming traffic. Also, many large-scale attacks don’t even reach our networks, as they’re filtered beforehand by our partner companies.
• Secondly, we use hardware appliances on the edge of our network, that scan the incoming traffic, detect attacks and block them, leaving the legitimate traffic unharmed.
• Thirdly, we work directly with game developers to employ measures that are specifically tailored towards the games we run. Instead of just relying on off-the-shelf solutions, we deeply analyze and understand the network traffic of our games and can therefor distinguish incoming attacks from legitimate traffic.

These measures combined result in a stable network that is resilient against any type of DDoS attack.

Power

All of our servers run with two separate Power Supply Units (PSUs). These PSUs are also connected to completely independent power feeds.

Should any of the two PSUs ever fail, the server will remain running without interruption. Due to the two separate feeds, even a large-scale power failure at the data center would remain unnoticed by anyone playing on these servers.

Network

Similar to the power supply, all of our core network components are redundant. This makes our network setup very resilient against hardware failure, should it ever occur.

On top of that, our high network bandwidth, both internally and externally, ensures that your game traffic is never impacted by anything else that is happening within our network.

Backups

Your game world and your progress are valuable to you, which is why they are valuable to us. To avoid data loss under any circumstances, we regularly create backups of your complete server and store them on separate host systems.

You can use these backups yourself and restore them through the Nitrado Web Interface, should you want to do so. Of course, should a hardware failure ever occur, we would automatically restore those backups for you.

On top of that, we give you full access to your game save files for all games where we’re allowed to do so. This allows you to create your own, local backups for even more security.